The Glazier

We have now to inquire what can cause us to doubt, and how doubt may be removed.
– Baruch Spinoza

We knew from Current Events that the African nations were becoming independent, and that it was no longer correct to prefix Congo with Belgian. We knew nothing of colonialism, only that there were new country names and colorful new flags. Still, it was monumental to realize that the broad map of the world that Mrs. Abrams pulled down at the start of geography class was mutable. That it could suddenly become obsolete was, for me, a tectonic shift.

Of course, this was long before the internet. History came to us as a fait accompli within the covers of a single decades-old textbook. I learned that World War Two came after World War One and that the United States had won them both, as predictably as the Yankees’ annual taking of the World Series. But I knew nothing of the Shoah.

What little I knew I learned from television. There was Sid Caesar with his Teutonic double-talk who had the audience in stitches and German measles which, goodness knows, were not as bad as regular measles, and German chocolate cake, my favorite.

Yes, I was ignorant. But I ask no exemption, no immunity. I do not want denied the guilt I feel.

*

November, 1959. Outside it’s dark and cold. Inside, the last of the heat is slipping through the transom in the classroom where I’m waiting for my ride home from Hebrew school. With me are Hegelman, the class clown, and Schwartz, my best friend. Hegelman is folding and stapling newsletters, punishment for being late to class. Schwartz’s bar mitzvah lesson begins in twenty minutes. He is totally engrossed, sketching in his notebook while he waits.

I met Schwartz at the Y. Six feet tall and an excellent swimmer, he always beat me when we raced laps. I should have had the advantage, he joked, because I didn't have any hair there. At Men’s Swim we didn’t wear trunks.

Schwartz wasn’t just an athlete, he could draw almost anything. Monsters, hot rods, rocket ships: he could reproduce comic book characters down to a T. But pinups were his specialty and they were truly impressive. He could get a dime apiece for them if he wanted, but he never charged me.

He’s working on one now and doesn’t mind me watching. Against all logic — and more out of curiosity than desire — he’s got me peering down the penciled décolletage of his latest creation.

How did he coax such allure from the page? Obviously his pinup drawings weren’t life studies any more than his monsters were. They weren’t even his fantasies, only someone else’s hand-me-downs. Still, I was jealous of his technique, and even more of his ability to pull us around him as he dispensed revelation.

My own attempts at drawing were medieval, lacking perspective, but I wanted to learn. I’d rise early Saturday morning to watch Jon Gnagy’s popular TV show, Learn To Draw.

“If you can draw these simple forms — the ball, cone, cube, and cylinder — you can draw a real picture the very first time you try!” 

Each show began with these thrilling words. Working in charcoal, the perfect medium for our black-and-white TV, Gnagy showed step-by-step how to bring a picture to life. His pompadour sleek and shining, his Van Dyke beard artistically trimmed, he was a magus parting the veil, revealing the pictured world in its essentials as a hidden garden of geometry.

I had seen it myself when Schwartz drew two circles which magically became eyes, then breasts with the simple addition of a well-placed dot.

Schwartz closed his notebook, walked toward the blackboard, and picked up a piece of orange chalk. He held it to his ear as though he was listening to a transistor radio, and then he began to draw.

I watched it take shape, but couldn’t believe my eyes. Had Schwartz gone crazy? He was drawing a cross! A fancy one, rough-hewn and covered with thorny vines, like the one in front of St. Anthony’s. And he was drawing it on the blackboard in the room where Mr.  Nathan held our Torah study class!

Hegelman had finished his stapling and was giggling his goofy laugh. Joining Schwartz at the blackboard, he picked up a piece of chalk and started to draw cloud shapes and stars. He was so bad that it gave me the courage to get up and join them. Just last week Schwartz had shown me how to draw a cube and now I was ready to debut it.

This is how it’s done, I thought as I started drawing it. First a large yellow square. Then, at its center, start another. Then join the two at their corners and ⎯ voila! – a cube has bloomed!

I took a step back and examined my cube. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant! I drew another, and another. Could I do the same with a circle? Not exactly, but I did manage a cylinder if not a sphere. Next I tried a triangle, and amazingly, with a few extra lines — and a little bit of squinting — I had a pyramid.

But the shape that fascinated me above all others was stubbornly elusive. Only after several false starts — did the spurs on the arms go up or go down? — was I able to get it right.

I had it nailed, so I drew it again, but I wanted to go one better. I wanted to get it to jump right off the board like Schwartz’s cross. So I drew another on top of it, and tried to join the two as I’d done with the squares.

But there were too many angles and it was hard to know where to draw the connections. Still, I kept going, even though I was only covering the blackboard with a flood of out-of-focus figures, like 3D without the glasses.

I knew there was something about that shape that was insolent, maybe even dirty — a word which meant, as far as I could tell, knowing more than I was supposed to. I’d told “dirty” jokes, clueless of their meaning, and was able to get laughs from my playground friends — though not Schwartz who actually understood them — entirely through my delivery. Years later, Shwartz sent me a copy of a cartoon.  In it, a kid was drawing graffiti on a wall, but having trouble with his spelling. The wall was covered with his false starts.

FUKC  PHUK  FUHK

That was me at the blackboard.

While I continued to struggle, Schwartz had added a naked woman to his cross! This was beyond the beyond, but it was there only for a moment before, to my amazement, he erased the whole thing!

Hegelman apparently couldn’t have cared less. He was quacking like a duck and following Schwartz out the door. The board was a mess of broken swastikas. I made a last ditch effort to buttress their flailing arms with guy lines of yellow chalk when Mr. Nathan, briefcase in hand, entered the classroom.

Mr. Nathan was everyone’s least favorite teacher. He was overweight and his fingernails were brown from nicotine. When he coughed, which was often, his breath was very bad. Regardless of the weather, he always wore the same outfit to class. A thick black tie and a dingy long-sleeved white shirt, through which one could see his hairy wrists.

Mr. Nathan’s face was pale as he scanned the blackboard. It darkened when he saw the yellow chalk in my hand, and his voice, in heavily accented English, quickly became furious. I should have felt chastened or afraid, but instead it struck me as funny. For in anger his excitable voice took on the tone of a comic. It was the Ed Sullivan show and he was Jackie Mason.

God forbid, I may even have smirked.

At that moment, I heard the bleat of my father’s VW, as welcome a sound as I could have imagined. I dropped the chalk, sidestepped Mr. Nathan with a feint, and ran out the door.

I knew I was in trouble, but surprisingly my parents were not contacted. Two days later, when I returned to Hebrew school, I found out why. Mr. Nathan was dead, the victim of a fatal heart attack.

*

It was awful. I felt responsible and afraid, and there was no one I could talk to. I dreaded going to Hebrew school for the remainder of the semester, but I couldn’t avoid it.

By then I had seen a portion of Judgment at Nuremberg. I’d lingered in the theater after the kids’ monster matinée had finished, and hid out in the bathroom till it was set to begin. Then I went back in and watched, shyly and with gruesome fascination, the surging crowd of full-arm salutes and the flawlessly goose-stepping army, until the usher kicked me out. But I’d seen enough to understand that it was a symbol of evil that I had drawn that day, and it was then that I understood the significance of the numbers I had glimpsed through Mr. Nathan’s thin white shirt. As penance, I started attending Junior Congregation.

*

And then things got even worse! I was still on edge a month later, worried sick over what had happened to Mr. Nathan, when my parents, while driving home from their favorite restaurant, were broadsided by a freight train. Evidently the signals failed to operate that snowy night. My father was a careful driver, but he was killed instantly, and my mother was grievously injured.

Needless to say, this tragedy on the heels of Mr. Nathan’s death pushed me to my emotional limit. I was hardly prepared to care for my mother, and since I was an only child, there was no else at home. Thankfully, my mother’s sister lived nearby and she was available and able to nurse my mother through those first difficult months.

Did I believe that my parents’ accident was divine justice being levied against me? I didn’t want to think so, but what else could I believe? Somehow I needed to redeem myself, so I made sure to follow my aunt’s instructions to the letter. I shopped for groceries, kept the house clean, and did what I could to raise my mother’s spirits. I played gin rummy with her, and together we listened to the Yankees’ games on the radio. I felt like I was doing the right thing, and it also gave me the excuse I needed to stop attending Hebrew school.

Though I put on a brave face, I was in very bad shape. My schoolwork suffered. I withdrew from my friends and kept to myself, stewing in my guilty thoughts. But it would have been a lot worse if it hadn’t been for Mr. Green.

Math had always been my favorite subject until I arrived in Mr. Green’s English class. Mr. Green knew more about everything than anyone I had ever known. And that was reassuring because I seemed to have forgotten everything I ever knew.

Mr. Green understood Chaucer and Shakespeare. He understood Freud. He understood Edward Albee. He understood symbolism and unreliable narrators. He understood ambiguity. He was a proponent of “close reading” and I had the feeling that he understood life itself. When he introduced me to Millay’s poem about Euclid, I felt it in my bones. 

Mr. Green wore his hair in bangs over his wide forehead and kept his sideburns long. It made him look like a Roman emperor. He was quirky. He gave the class snap quizzes on the backs of Broadway twofers and left thin magazines published on newsprint on his desk for us to carry away. He was also the advisor to The Clarion, the school newspaper, an extra-curricular activity which, he informed me conspiratorially, was highly appropriate for the college-bound. That was the only nudge I needed. I volunteered for The Clarion. I would loved to have done a comic strip but still had not learned to draw. So instead, I set myself the task of creating a crossword puzzle for my debut.

I started from scratch with just a single word in the top-left corner of an empty rectangle on a blank sheet of white cardboard. It had not occurred to me to block out the puzzle symmetrically. Instead I built it as I went along.

1 Across: Captain of the cheerleaders. Yes, I had a crush on Debbie Greenberg and I wanted the world to know. There she was at the top of page two. Read it left to right. Give me a “G”, give me an “R”, give me an “E”. You get the gist.

What I needed now was a word starting with “G” for 1 Down. I didn’t want to get too arcane so I scrapped Grendel and Galileo. Glockenspiel was questionable, probably known only to members of the band. How about Garfield? Not the president, but the high school we’d creamed 112 to 37 in basketball.

And so it went. Doggedly I continued on without plan, sustained solely by momentum. The cardboard proved a good choice as there were many revisions which less hardy paper would not have endured. A black square here and another there, and long stumping times when it seemed impossible to continue. More than once cleverness painted me into a corner that I only escaped through the use of abbreviations and the names of musical notes. It took me nearly all week and it was touch and go right down to the wire, but I persisted and in the end finally got it to cohere. I missed my deadline, and in order to avoid the embarrassment of a six-inch hole on the features page, I had to personally drop off the puzzle at the printer’s.

And when I had finished, what had I created? A miscellany of offbeat trivia? A cryptic love letter to Debbie Greenberg? An asymmetric cry for help? Yes, it was all of these, of course, but fundamentally it was copy — copy with my byline on it and that was all that mattered.

The day after The Clarion came out, Debbie Greenberg stopped me in the hallway to tell me the crossword puzzle was no good because it had a mistake in it. I checked it out and sure enough she was right. There was no way that the abbreviation for North Dakota would intersect with a 9-letter word for “second-year student” beginning with “S”.

Bad as that was, it was not the worst of my troubles. Mr. Green had asked me to stop by his office after lunch. I imagined him skewering me for missing my deadline and skipping editorial review.

“What is this, Mr. Klein?” he asked, holding The Clarion open to reveal my crossword puzzle. All the blank spaces, save one, had been filled in with the tiny scroll of his black fountain pen. “Mrs. Horowitz claims she sees a swastika in your crossword puzzle.”

“I’m not surprised,” I replied as dryly as I could. Mrs. Horowitz, a colleague of Mr. Green’s in the English Department, was also known to see phallic symbols in sunflowers and trees.

Mr. Green picked up a colored pencil and outlined the black squares that formed the puzzle’s scaffolding in red ink.

“Oh, my God!”

I was dumbstruck. I had been so busy counting letters and choosing words, I had not bothered to examine the shape emanating from the puzzle’s core.

“Why would I put a swastika in the middle of a crossword puzzle?”

“That’s what Mrs. Horowitz wanted to know.”

“What do you mean?”

“She wanted to know if it had been willfully drawn.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Or if you were making some sort of statement.”

“Unbelievable.”

“This is your byline, isn’t it?”

“Of course it is, but I’m not responsible for what you’re trying to make it out to be.”

“What, then, are you responsible for?”

“I didn’t know it was there.”

“Not a conscious choice?”

“Right! So I’m not responsible.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I am responsible?”

“Mr. Klein, I suggest you become a more observant Jew.”

Then he smiled, shook my hand, and  ushered me out the door.

*

It seemed like I was cursed. Would I be marked like Cain forever with a taint of evil?  The succeeding years were not easy for me.

The times were confusing enough. Assassinations. War. There was a counterculture. Reality itself was being questioned. If there was a hidden meaning, I couldn’t find it, and Mr. Green wasn’t there to help me.

I was lost, adrift, and jumping from ship to ship seeking salvation. The toll of the church bells seemed personal, throttling me to awake, but I knew I’d find no solace there. Saviors seemed to be beckoning from every corner but I wouldn’t submit to their call. I avoided the Hare Krishnas. I looked askance at Jews for Jesus, an unctuous bunch whose attempts at self-abasement only emphasized my own estrangement. The well-dressed members of the Unification Church who invited me to dinner I found too friendly, too quick to chum up with a sinner like myself.

Inundated by an excess of Truth, I attempted returning to Judaism, but it didn’t work. It was as if I had been excommunicated. One particularly gruesome evening, I drank an entire bottle of Manischewitz wine, its square base reminiscent of the turret-shaped synagogue where my trauma had begun. It tasted worse than I remembered, but I finished the bottle, began a second and then immediately vomited, bringing me both relief and shame.

During what I now refer to as my lost decade, I used to watch videos of old TV shows on YouTube, hoping they might cheer me up. I remembered the shiver of delight I’d felt when I was younger listening to Jonathan Winters, the manic mainstay of 60s late-night television famous for his improvisational word salad.  I listened to the studio audience laughing as I had back then but couldn’t join in the hilarity. Why was “one-legged albino from Afghanistan” funny? Was it simply the incongruity? I can hear Mr. Green saying that was part of it, as were the limerick-like cadence and alliteration. He’d also stress Winter’s delivery, which was prompting the audience for laughter.

But it wasn’t funny. The world had changed, had become hyperlinked, and “one-legged albino from Afghanistan” was no longer innocent nonsense. It was cringeworthy. All too easily, I saw the pale victim of a Russian landmine. Depressed, I closed the lid of my laptop. Years later, my uneasiness was captured in the perfect bon mot by Murray, my confidante and housemate-to-be, when he christened the internet the “World Wide Welt”.

It was all too much. I was drawn back to the simplicity of the basic forms Jon Gnagy had shown me when I was a boy. I embraced mathematics wholeheartedly. That was meaning enough.

My mistake was that I moved too quickly into deep water. The prospect of the infinite was seductive, but I did not have the constitution for it. A rare type of vertigo, diagnosed at one time as a form of dyslexia, affected me when I turned my attention to calculus. Recursion and the transfinite caused me dizziness, even nausea. Luckily, the classical syllabus of geometry, trig, and algebra was sufficient for employment at a private high school, and it is there that I have taught these past twenty-five years.

I have Murray to thank for my sobriety. We met at an AA meeting. He worked as a hospice nurse and was a man of rare intelligence and sly humor. After my mother died, we became housemates and, over time, dear friends. 

Murray introduced me to gospel music. Not the energetic redemption of black spirituals but the sober liturgy of country music. “A Tramp on the Street”, “I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore” and “I’ll Fly Away” were among his favorites. He was an aficionado, not a believer, and I was glad for the introduction.

Murray continually astonished me with the breath of his knowledge. When I first told him I taught high school math he asked me if I had ever heard of Arno Einhorn. I hadn’t, so he filled me in.

Einhorn, who died at Auschwitz at the age of thirty-seven, taught math at a high school in Göttingen. He kept a notebook, only recently discovered, that in Murray’s hyperbolic style, “wittily refuted the allegation that mathematics and satire were parallel lines of thought.” A prime example being his memorable proof that the shortest distance between two tyrants ran through Poland.

In another entry, he compared the five books of Moses to a poker hand, and not an especially good one at that. No matter that this was before draw poker had been invented, the rebbes knew that not only had they had been dealt a bad hand, but they had no recourse but to hold onto the cards they had. And since there was no way in the world that anyone could win with such a hand, they had only one option open to them: do everything in their power to bluff their way out of it. It isn’t cheating to do that. Fortunately the art of the bluff was not lost to them.

 Einhorn’s take on Judaism is pretty much in line with my own.

*

Murray  picked up the infection from one of his patients. We didn’t talk about funeral arrangements. There was no need to. The decision had been made for us. Cremation within twenty-four hours of death. 

Neither of us was especially religious though we both were Jewish,  as were many of our friends. It was how we answered the question on the census and hospital forms, and responded to those who were curious about our features and our ancestry. It was a club we belonged to without ever having joined, and it offered only a sense of anxious community which could become discomforting if one took it too seriously.  

But for all its faults, that community had come up with a name to describe a good person and that was something no one else had done. I wanted Murray to be recognized for the mensch he was. We quibbled, but he finally agreed.

I had not attended a synagogue in years, but the enormity of his impending death seemed to demand an extra-normal response. We had both been curious about the progressive temple up the street. I contacted them and asked if it was possible to hold a memorial service for Murray. It was highly irregular, of course, since he was still alive,  but his days were numbered. I argued that it would give his friends the final opportunity to share their love with him and would be a thoughtful and proper sendoff.

I think we both wanted to identify with our kinsmen more than we could. We were seeking a connection deeper than history, more authentic than ritual. But it wasn’t just the embarrassing anthropology of the Old Testament. We could part those waters if need be, just as we had learned to live with the infernal fife and drum of our Early American forebears. Hadn’t we waved Old Glory even as we had marched on Washington?

But what did we expect? The lost tribes of the East Coast were gone, vanished into time. The rabbi was younger than either of us. The prayers were in English and American Sign Language.  The sermon was about the dervishes of Sufi and the chakras of Tibet. It was a polyglot universe spinning out of control. They were making it too easy to be a Jew.

But watching Murray as his friends spoke, I knew it had been the right thing to do. My own words came out in a torrent of tears. A week later he was dead.  Perhaps in another life Murray and I would have been together in that old men’s minyan, but in this one I only got to say the Kaddish for him, alone, and over his ashes.

*

Three weeks after Murray’s death. I was heading toward Birnam Books where William McGunne, Murray’s favorite author, was scheduled to read from his new novel, A Time of Innocence. Out of nowhere a white sedan came roaring up behind me. The light ahead of me changed to red but the sedan kept approaching. I didn’t dare stop and instead raced across the intersection as fast as I could. In spite of the rain, I had a clear view and the intersection was empty, but the flashing lights behind me were signaling me to pull over, and the other car had vanished from sight.

“Officer,” I pleaded, “I didn’t have a choice. If I had stopped, it would have been an accident.”

The officer chose not to understand and handed me a ticket for two hundred dollars.

An hour later I was still in a foul mood. A too-hurried dinner had given me indigestion and I was now late for the reading. I circled the block a second time searching for a parking spot not too far from the streetlights, found nothing, and ended up parking three blocks away. Walking to the bookstore, I was stopped twice for spare change and by a man who wanted to sell me a watch. Evidently the grapevine had it that the bookstore was a go-to destination for generous marks.

By the time I got inside, the reading had already begun. All the seats were taken and there was barely room to stand. I couldn’t see McGunne, but I could hear his amplified voice. Looking around the room, I saw that most of the audience was women and they were carrying copies of books whose titles I didn’t recognize. The voice, I realized now, though deep, was female. Something was not right.

I made my way through the throng to the front of the store, examined the calendar, and saw that the McGunne reading had been the previous Saturday night. I felt stupid as I stormed out the door.

It was raining hard now, and I almost slipped on the slick sidewalk. I was getting soaked so I dashed for the phone booth on the corner, barely beating out the man who had wanted to sell me a watch. He was studying me cagily, so I needed to feign a phone call. I dropped a quarter in the slot and dialed my house.

Pasted on the glass inside the booth was a time-ravaged broadside, a slice of agitprop from the previous spring. Protest in the park. Demonstrate against the fascist regime. I recognized the sponsor of the tricolor announcement, a group now largely discredited and lately in the news because of inflammatory and unrepentant remarks by one of its spokesmen. Across the broadside someone had drawn a large black swastika, but whether this commentary was meant as an endorsement or a rebuttal I couldn’t tell.

The watch salesman was knocking on the glass, my cue to start talking angrily into the phone. “What do you want me to do? How should I know?” I yelled at my answering machine, and the watch salesman moved away from the phone booth.

I’d seen this swastika before and had always found its proximity to the bookstore disturbing. Now I felt its crooked finger pointing at me, demanding action. I had a felt-tip pen in my breast pocket and was tempted to use it to cover the swastika’s ugliness, when a car with its high beams drove by, and I saw myself exposed, a man in a glass booth, caught pen-in-hand in a news photo under a splash headline: 

FORMER TEACHER A NAZI SYMPATHIZER

The car wasn’t moving. I was still in its glare and being stung by a swarm of imagined recriminations and praise.

A clutch of civil libertarians, eager to shake my hand, were thanking me for preserving free speech and honoring the Spirit of Skokie.

They faded and were replaced by a frenzy of avant-garde artists cooing over my brave headlong plunge into full-tilt transgression.

I was dizzy and I felt my dinner beginning to rise. I choked it down and thought angrily of the moron of a driver who had nearly collided with me. I continued to yell into the phone even though the watch salesman had left for the shelter of the bookstore awning.

The rain was unrelenting. It streamed down the glass panels of the telephone booth. The car at the corner had moved on but in the purplish afterimage of its headlights I saw from above, as though I were flying, a maze in the shape of a giant swastika and laughing children running toward it, eager to be lost within its walls.

Instinctively I shut my eyes. The shape returned, brass-colored now and built from heaps of spent cartridges beside which children lay motionless on the ground.

I kept my eyes closed and the shape continued to change. I saw the wet signature of a snail, and the shadows cast by clouds. I then followed a drunkard’s walk, and felt the contours of unspoken words and never-done deeds.

The rain was beating against the metal roof of the phone booth.  I opened my eyes, saw the shadow cast by the shape of my life, and I heard it speak.

“If not now, when?” it asked.

And I replied, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Nathan.”

I took the pen out of my breast pocket. Through my squinting eyes, the swastika had become a broken window. Four quick pen strokes and I had it repaired. The rain had let up. I examined my work, hung up the receiver, capped the pen, and headed back to my car.